#yaron brook

[thesongthesoulsings]

We object to cronyism, and the only solution to cronyism is to shrink government power so that government doesn't get involved in business and business doesn't have any incentive to lobby it.

Yaron Brook [ Ayn Rand: Philosophy, Objectivism, Self Interest - Dave Rubin Report] 

[blackwolfmanx4]

Why "Safety" is NOT Paramount in Capitalism

[blackwolfmanx4]

Yaron Brook: In Defense of Capitalism

People that bash capitalism always fail to list what's wrong with it without bringing up the faults of government.

[ahumourlessworld]

“Here’s the point: Government’s job is not to dictate your values but to protect them. In a free country, you choose values and then use your own money as a tool to achieve them. But a value-rigged tax policy reverses this cause and effect — it uses your money against you, bribing you with tax breaks that let you keep some of your earnings in exchange for abandoning your preferred values.

Clearly, we have slid a long way downhill from this nation’s founding, when political leaders respected individuals’ ability to make rational decisions for themselves about how to pursue their own health, wealth and happiness. Today, it is commonly accepted that Uncle Sam has a right to reach not only into your wallet but into your soul, through tax policies that substitute some version of the “public interest” for your own rational desires.

Of course, tax policy is only one form of “social engineering” — spending and direct regulation are other coercive methods of substituting collective values for private choice. But when it comes to micro-managing our lives, there are two reasons why tax incentives remain one of politicians’ favorites.

First, people find comfort in the illusion of self-direction that goes along with tax incentives — they would rather be lured by a tasty carrot than beaten with a stick. Second, tax law is an easy mechanism through which politicians can dispense favors to supporters, as Clinton, Obama and McCain have each pledged to do. Every year numerous pages are added to the long list of politically correct values.

In place of the limitless variety that emerges when individuals plan their own lives in a free society, tax laws strive to impose a dreary sameness — as if every individual should get married, have children, buy a home and save for retirement on a government-approved schedule — and as if every company should look to bureaucrats for the one true path to selecting real estate, equipment, fuels, employees and financing. Such artificial homogeneity has no place in the tax policy of a government dedicated to protecting individual rights.

If government were restricted to its proper functions — police, courts and a strong military to defend individual rights against physical force and fraud — our 66,000-page coercive tax code would be a thing of the past. What’s more, a great burden would be lifted, not just from the economy, but from our lives.

Imagine reasserting ourselves as rational, sovereign individuals, whose rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the right to choose values without asking society’s permission — and without chasing our own money, like lab rats sniffing cheese, down the twisting corridors of a labyrinthine tax code.” - Yaron Brook, ‘Life and Taxes’ (17 April 2008)

[blackwolfmanx4]

Immigration and the U.S. Economy: Who Wins and Who Loses?

America is divided into two groups: some believe immigration helps the economy, while others say they don't.

[blackwolfmanx4]

The Truth About Selfishness: How ‘Greedy’ People Make Life Better for Ev...

People can be selfish, but not in a way you think.

[ahumourlessworld]

“What should the United Sates do about the [1973] Arab-Israeli War?

Give all help possible to Israel. Consider what is at stake. It is not the moral duty of any country to send men to die helping another country. The help Israel needs is technology and military weapons—and they need them desperately. Why should we help Israel? Israel is fighting not just the Arabs but Soviet Russia, who is sending the Arabs armaments. Russia is after control of the Mediterranean and oil.

Further, why are the Arabs against Israel? (This is the main reason I support Israel.) The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are still practically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.” - Ford Hall Forum lecture (1973) [p. 96]

(…)

“Would you comment on the rights of the Palestinians to their homeland?

Whatever rights the Palestinians may have had—I don't know the history of the Middle East well enough to know what started the trouble—they have lost all rights to anything: not only to land, but to human intercourse. If they lost land, and in response resorted to terrorism—to the slaughter of innocent citizens—they deserve whatever any commandos anywhere can do to them, and I hope the commandos succeed.” - Ford Hall Forum lecture (1977) [p. 97]

As yet another appalling suicide bombing takes place in Israel, killing nineteen people and wounding dozens more on a bus packed with school

“We should be supporting Israel’s right to take whatever military action is needed to defend itself against its nihilistic enemies. Morally and militarily, Israel is America’s frontline in the war on terrorism. If America is swayed by Arafat’s latest empty rhetoric, and allows him to continue threatening Israel, our own campaign against terrorism becomes sheer hypocrisy and will, ultimately, fail.

(…)

Israel is the only free country in a region dominated by Arab monarchies, theocracies and dictatorships. It is only the citizens of Israel — Arabs and Jews alike — who enjoy the right to express their views, to criticize their government, to form political parties, to publish private newspapers, to hold free elections. When Arab authorities deny the most basic freedoms to their own people, it is obscene for them to start claiming that Israel is violating the Palestinians’ rights. All Arab citizens who are genuinely concerned with human rights should, as their very first action, seek to oust their own despotic rulers and adopt the type of free society that characterizes Israel.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has had to fight five wars — all in self-defense — against twenty-two hostile Arab dictatorships, and has been repeatedly attacked by Palestinian terrorists. Arafat is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli schoolchildren, the hijacking of airliners and the car bombings and death-squad killings of thousands of Israeli, American, Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Today he ardently sponsors such terror groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aksa Brigade.

The land Israel is “occupying” was captured in a war initiated by its Arab neighbors. Like any victim of aggression, Israel has a moral right to control as much land as is necessary to safeguard itself against attack. The Palestinians want to annihilate Israel, while Israel wants simply to be left alone. If there is a moral failing on Israel’s part, it consists of its reluctance to take stronger military measures. If it is right for America to bomb al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan — and it is — then it is equally justifiable for Israel to bomb the terrorist strongholds in the occupied territories.

Like America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict between opposing philosophies. On the one side are the forces of mysticism, medieval tribalism, dictatorship — and terror; on the other side are the forces of reason, individualism, capitalism — and civilization. Arafat and his sympathizers hate Israel for the same reason that Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers hate America, i.e., for embracing secular, Western values. No “peace process” is possible with such enemies.

(…)

Only Israel has a moral right to establish a government in that area — on the grounds, not of some ethnic or religious heritage, but of a secular, rational principle. Only a state based on political and economic freedom has moral legitimacy. Contrary to what the Palestinians are seeking, there can be no “right” to establish a dictatorship.

As to the rightful owners of particular pieces of property, Israel’s founders — like the homesteaders in the American West — earned ownership to the land by developing it. They arrived in a desolate, sparsely populated region and drained the swamps, irrigated the desert, grew crops and built cities. They worked unclaimed land or purchased it from the owners. They introduced industry, libraries, hospitals, art galleries, universities — and the concept of individual rights. Those Arabs who abandoned their land in order to join the military crusade against Israel forfeited all right to their property. And if there are any peaceful Arabs who were forcibly evicted from their property, they should be entitled to press their claims in the courts of Israel, which, unlike the Arab autocracies, has an independent, objective judiciary — a judiciary that recognizes the principle of property rights.

(…)

In 1947 the Palestinians rejected the U.N.’s offer of a state larger than the one they are demanding now. Instead, they joined in a war aimed at wiping Israel from the map. Today, that hostility has only hardened. For example, in a televised public sermon, a Palestinian Imam declared: “God willing, this unjust state [of] Israel, will be erased.” Palestinian textbooks are filled with vile, anti-Jewish propaganda, such as this exhortation from a fifth-grade Arabic language text: “The Jihad against the Jew is the religious duty of every Muslim man and woman.”

(…)

The Arab-Israeli conflict could become a dress rehearsal for a wider, global conflict. If America now stops Israel from retaliating against Arafat, the father of international terrorism, how can it ever justify retaliation against its own enemies? If we force Israel to appease Arafat, we will be broadcasting, loud and clear, that terrorism can bring America too to its knees.

We should urge our government to recognize that there is only one means of achieving long-term Mideast peace: upholding the principle of a free society, which entails the endorsement of Israel’s sweeping retaliation against the scourge of terrorism.”

The Libertarian Case for Israel

Anti-Israel sentiment abounds in the Arab world due to their rejection of Jewish presence in the area, especially in the form of a State. Wh

“Anti-Israel sentiment abounds in the Arab world due to their rejection of Jewish presence in the area, especially in the form of a State. What is much more vexing is that a similar attitude is pervasive among the libertarian community (and, even, shonda, amongst, happily, a very small percentage of Jews) where Israel is often picked out as a particularly pernicious state relative to almost all others. Libertarians, of course, are no big fans of any government, but even for libertarians who believe in a minimum state (so called “minarchists”) encompassing domestic protection (police), protection from foreigners (defensive army), and courts, why Israel should be singled out as particularly pernicious is troubling.

We believe much of the anti-Israel sentiment among libertarians has its source in an article written in 1967 by the father of the modern libertarian movement, Professor Murray N. Rothbard, entitled “War Guilt in the Middle East”. In this essay, Rothbard pins the blame for the Six Day War entirely on Israel, essentially saying that Israel should have done nothing in response to the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran at the time, as well as passively accepted explicit threats by Arab leaders to destroy it and annihilate the Jews who live in its territory.

(…)

In our rejoinder to an article in the Indonesian Journal of International and Comparative Law (2016. Vol. 3, Issue 3, June, pp. 435-553), we argue that Israel is not a “uniquely pernicious” state built on outright land expropriation. Our thesis, aside from correcting what we see as Rothbard’s historical inaccuracies leading up to the creation of the State of Israel, is that Rothbard did not go far back enough in time in analyzing legitimate land claims. According to libertarianism, the only thing that grants a person title to land is “homesteading” that territory, essentially mixing one’s labor with it (a la, John Locke, and Rothbard, too). It is historically indisputable that Jews homesteaded much of Palestine long before the late 19th century and the modern Zionist movement. Much of the land currently under dispute was homesteaded by Jews before the territory was even called “Palestine,” when it was in fact called “Judea”.

According to generally accepted historical accounts, Judea was populated by around 2,500,000-3,000,000 Jews at the turn of the common era, including 600,000 in Jerusalem at the time of its destruction in 70 CE. These Jews were unjustly murdered or expelled from their lands and sold into slavery after rebelling against the Roman Empire. Since there can be no man-made statute of limitations in libertarianism, if modern day Jews can prove descent from the original Jewish homesteaders, which we demonstrate they can both culturally and genetically, then all land with prodigious evidence of previous Jewish homesteading dated to the time of the fall of Judea, should return to the descendants of the original homesteaders. These are modern day Jews, who by and large have never relinquished their claims to their ancient homeland.

(…)

In tackling Rothbard’s claims of mass expulsion of Arabs during the 1948 War of Independence, we concede that this did indeed happen in certain isolated cases. But the point is, did they have a right to these areas in the first place? Not in our view. However, in most cases, these villages were abandoned voluntarily in an effort to clear the way for the invading Arab armies at the time. In other cases, Arab towns were used as staging grounds to launch attacks. In such cases, the accusation of land theft against Israel cannot be taken seriously. Moreover, Arabs who decided to stay in Israel are now an integral part of the country with full rights as Israeli citizens. Thus, the charge of theft or “ethnic cleansing” is simply absurd. In fact, the population that was ethnically cleansed were the Jews of Arab countries (about 850,000), who were expelled and expropriated after the creation of the State of Israel. Israel critics never talk about this.

Finally, regarding the legitimacy of Israel as a state, even according to Israel’s most vociferous critics of which Rothbard was one, 7% of pre-1948 Palestine was purchased legitimately by Jews. Given that, would Jews have a right to set up a State on that limited territory, and if attacked, expand those lands in a defensive action? From the perspective of libertarians who recognize the right to set up a minimalist state for the purposes of security and defense only, certainly.

Our conclusion is that Israel is in fact built on both legitimate land purchases as well as legitimate land claims from the past, specifically the Roman period. Ideally, all land in Israel with obvious signs of previous Jewish homesteading dated to the Roman destruction should revert to Jews by shares of stock, i.e. to those Jews who descend from the original homesteaders. These include the Temple Mount (which we know was built by Jewish Kohanim) and the entire Old City of Jerusalem as well as most of modern day East Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

While we do not encourage libertarians to take sides in this conflict, we suggest that if they wish to do so, they should side with Israel as the most (classically) liberal, and therefore the most relatively libertarian country in the region.”

[sensiblephilosophy]

DEBATE: Objectivism Vs. Socialism W/ Yaron Brook & Ben Burgis